If you’re interested in blogging your game sessions, here are a few helpful hints on how to do so. I’m not going to go into the technical aspects of building a blog since that is another animal within itself. But here are three critical things that I found out the hard way when I started blogging game sessions.

1 – Keep notes as you go throughout your session. Basically you want to write a timeline for yourself of what is happening and what the highlights are. If something particularly cool or funny happens, write it down. If you don’t, you might still remember the event later, but you may forget the exact details or the order in which things happened.

2 – Write your blog post soon after your game session. Preferably, you want to write at least a first draft within the next one or two days. I can say this from experience; if you don’t get the initial draft down quickly you’re going to forget a lot. Even with my notes and timeline that I keep during the session, if I fail to get everything down on paper quickly it’s hard to recall exactly what happened. Personally, I try to get the post done the next day after the game session.

3 – Set a time limit and article length and stick to it. The first time I began to blog one of my game sessions, I got way too detailed. The article took me about an hour to get through just the first part of the session. It got to the point where blogging about the session was going to take as long as the session itself. Figure out how long you want to write for and what length of an article you want. This is going to depend on how well you type and write, but you’ll figure it out. If you choose to spend thirty minutes writing an article of 500-1000 words, stick to it.

Additional Tips:

- Mention each player character and the game master in the article. Everyone wants their moment in the sun. And everyone there contributed to making the game session what it was.

- Give your post a real title. I’ve read other people’s game session articles. I really liked it when they had a title like, “Journey into Mardok’s Temple”, as opposed to, “06-11-08 Game Session”. It just gives it more flavor.

- Skip the boring stuff and focus on the highlights. So much happens in a game session, you want to limit your article to just the important highlights. Make sure it has a flow so readers can understand what is going on, but dump the boring stuff.

- Write in past tense. This was something I read in another article about blogging your game sessions and I completely agree. It keeps consistency with your articles and just sounds better.

- Try to write one article per game session. This one can be up to the writer. I’ve seen game session blogs that lumped one to four sessions into each article, but as a reader I preferred one article per game session. Just too much happens in multiple game sessions to cram it all into one article. It sounds like you’re reading the Cliff Notes to someone’s entire campaign.

- Include pictures of things that happened during that session. If the game master has a cool prop, or someone brings in a painted miniature, take a picture of it and post it with the article. Your blog article will look way more interesting with it, plus it will give you and the other players a little nostalgia to look back at down the road.

If you have any tips about blogging your game session, please post them!